Rep. Thomas Massie Sounds Warning: House Leaders to Merge Obama-Style Gun Control with National Reciprocity

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images4 Dec 2017

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is warning that House Leadership plans to merge Obama-style gun control with national reciprocity for concealed carry.

This news comes just days before Rep. Richard Hudson’s (R-NC) national reciprocity legislation, H.R. 38, is supposed to go the House floor for a vote.

Massie explains that the Obama-style gun controls are contained in the “fix-NICS” legislation, the very legislation that House Leadership “plans to merge” with H.R. 38. He used a Facebook post to explain the “fix-NICS” legislation would allow “agencies, not just courts, to adjudicate your second amendment rights.”

He expounds:

[“Fix-NICS”] encourages administrative agencies, not the courts, to submit more names to a national database that will determine whether you can or can’t obtain a firearm. When President Obama couldn’t get Congress to pass gun control, he implemented a strategy of compelling, through administrative rules, the Veterans Administration and the Social Security Administration to submit lists of veterans and seniors, many of whom never had a day in court, to be included in the NICS database of people prohibited from owning a firearm. Only a state court, a federal (article III) court, or a military court, should ever be able to suspend your rights for any significant period of time.

Massie does not name names, but presumes that some are seeking to add the gun control legislation as a way of “to ensure reciprocity will pass in the Senate.” Yet he believes it is a foolish attempt to gain the support of Senators like Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who will not support national reciprocity legislation “even if it contains the fix-NICS legislation they support for expanding the background check database.”

Massie observed, “If our House leadership insists on bringing the flawed fix-NICS bill to the floor, they shouldn’t play games. We should vote separately on HR 38, the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Bill, and HR 4477, the fix-NICS bill. And we should be given enough time to amend the fix-NICS bill, because it needs to be fixed, if not axed.”